Seeking Knowledge with Palestine

You have now arrived in the UK having endured one of the most horrific crimes of our times. Words struggle to comfort you. Expressions such as ‘congratulations’, ‘well done’, and ‘welcome’ feel empty, and slightly out of context. I may not have a proper greeting but what I have is a sense of relief that you have survived. This survival happened through education. They usually say education changes lives and transforms societies. In the Palestinian case, education saves lives and remakes life. You are rebuilding yourself and along the way you are also remaking life in Gaza, with Gaza and for Gaza.

To be Palestinian is to carry the pride and pain of being a builder and a rebuilder. We build and rebuild again. Your education in the UK is another path of building that you will navigate, and you will not be alone.

I do not have to tell you that education is not just knowledge, skills, deadlines, projects and marks. You know this already. Education, for Palestinians, plays a role in resisting our annihilation and cultural erasure. As a student you can explore ways of creating a critical space for visiting your discipline through the prism of Palestine. Whether you are studying humanities, social sciences, business management, natural sciences, development studies, health, engineering (and the list goes on), there will always be a Palestine link even if most people refuse to it. There is always a link, and it is upon you to find it, hold it, language it and make it the catalyst for rethinking your discipline. There is no manual for how to create a Palestine paradigm for your field, but the following ideas will help you find your way.

Read key scholarship in your field of study and ask yourself the following questions:

• Who wrote these theories?
• Which worldviews are assumed to be true and universal?
• Whose voices are included in the field I study?
• Whose voices, views and experiences are missing? Why?

Think critically of these points and pay attention to the politics of inclusion and exclusion in the construction of knowledge. Academia likes to claim objectivity and neutrality. The truth is the world is always perceived from a subjective lens. Ontologies (the nature of being in the world) are not objective descriptions of what the world is. Rather, they are subjective readings of being. Some positions (usually White) are granted the status of ‘normative’ so that their scholarship is assumed to be objective. Others (often racialised bodies including the Palestinians) are seen to be ‘subjective’, not neutral and in need of positionality statements to accompany/frame/restrict/diminish the impact of their scholarship. Understand the politics of voice and knowledge production to help you see through the smoke and mirrors of neutrality in academia.

Now, use your critical thinking skills and personal experience to carve your own scholarship in ways that uncover the injustices and double standards that have kept Palestine in the realm of unspeakability for years. Explore these areas slowly and steadily. Refer to Palestinian scholars and learn from other anticolonial strugglers. There are inspiring role models. Find them, walk alongside their work, and learn from them as you find your own way.

Palestine matters. It is for this reason that it has been pushed outside and aside. It is upon you to explore ways of doing the critical work in your field that centres Palestine at the heart of what it means to be a responsible and response-able knowledge seeker and knowledge producer in the world today.

Let Gaza hold your hand

To a world of unfinished struggle